A Canada flag is backlit atop the East Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Oct. 31.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Just before lunchtime on Thursday, MPs in the House of Commons were debating a procedural motion related to a committee report on medical assistance in dying. It wasn’t going anywhere.
It didn’t much matter. There were only two MPs from the governing Liberal Party in the chamber. This particular debate was just burning up a few hours, and it had been triggered to get away from another debate that has been taking place over and over again.
For 19 days, the Conservatives have been filibustering their own motion in the House of Commons as a protest of the Liberal government’s failure to produce documents related to conflicts of interest at a now-defunct agency.
There have been minority parliamentary showdowns over government documents before, under this Liberal government and the Conservative government of former prime minister Stephen Harper. Eventually there’s usually some kind of deal. Sometimes it takes years.
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Right now, the parties in Parliament aren’t motivated to get there. They’re not that worried about making the legislature work. They each have their own reasons not to.
In the meantime, substantive things can’t get through the House of Commons. Legislation can’t be passed.
The Conservatives don’t mind that. But the days set aside for opposition motions aren’t being allocated either, so they also can’t put forward another non-confidence motion for a while.
If it keeps up, the politician worrying most about it could be Ontario Premier Doug Ford. He’s planning to send $200 cheques to Ontarians, paid for in large part by a windfall from federal changes to capital-gains taxes – but the Commons hasn’t passed the ways and means motion for that. If it isn’t passed before the Liberal government falls, there will be no windfall for Ontario.
The showdown started in September because the Liberal government defied a Commons order to release documents from the now-defunct Sustainable Development Technology Canada, whose board members were found to have broken conflict of interest rules. Speaker Greg Fergus ruled the refusal was a breach of Parliament’s privileges.
What happened next was unusual: Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer put forward a motion to refer the issue to a parliamentary committee – the usual process that can eventually lead to declaring the government in contempt. But then Conservative MPs began to filibuster their own motion.
Debating that privilege motion takes precedence over government business until it is decided, and Conservative MPs keep on standing up to debate it, hour after hour, so it doesn’t come to a vote. It’s a protest – and Conservatives say they will keep it up till the government hands over all the documents.
One peculiarity is that the Conservatives asked for the documents to be sent to the Commons law clerk so they can be forwarded to the RCMP. And the Liberal government argues – as do some parliamentary experts – that the Commons doesn’t have the right to demand documents just to send them to a third party.
That’s a legalistic question. It seems like it would have been easy enough for Mr. Scheer to get around that objection by asking for the documents to be sent to a Commons committee, rather than the RCMP. The RCMP has said they don’t want the documents anyway.
The other opposition parties – the Bloc Québécois and the NDP – have made it clear they think the Conservative filibuster is a pointless stunt. But they aren’t willing to team up with the Liberals to stop it.
They, too, insist the government has to hand over the documents, but both were in favour of referring the issue to the procedure and House affairs committee.
But if either party wanted to, they could join with the Liberals to end the filibuster.
Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet was open to that, for a while – as long as the Liberals agreed to his other demands, including a multibillion-dollar increase to Old Age Security. But now his Oct. 29 deadline for deal-making has passed.
NDP House Leader Peter Julian has criticized the Conservatives for filibustering their own motion, but they haven’t moved to stop it. The New Democrats backed out of a formal alliance with the Liberals less than two months ago, and they’re not keen to look like they are joining forces with the Liberals again.
Perhaps now that Mr. Blanchet’s Bloc is no longer playing let’s-make-a-deal, they’re waiting for the Liberals to offer them something good. In the meantime, political parties aren’t feeling much motivation to get Parliament moving.